Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Keeping track of the OSR and Old School Gaming

The popularity of Google+ for the OSR meant that blogs took a back seat for many. Now that Google+ is ending, blogs are making a come back. One things that developed for blogs in the last couple of years is a type of software called a Planet. Planet software aggregates the feeds of the member blogs to allow people to track many related blogs at once.

One of the nice things about the OSR and the current state of independent publisher that the Do it Yourself attitude often lead somebody somewhere to come up with a decent solution to a problem that the community faces. So kudos to Alex for taking the initiative on this and hope that it continues to be a useful tool keeping the connections within the OSR and Old School gaming in general alive.

5 comments:

It looks as if that website is using the blog list from Save vs. Total Party Kill. He provides that list so you can use it on your own newsreader on your phone, computer, or tablet. To get the list look in the archive section of his website. For newsreaders I recommend feedly or flym

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.